BCS football

The season is just beginning, yet a controversial ending is already easy to spot:

Let’s say Alabama or Ohio State goes undefeated. Would an undefeated Louisville, the dominant team in the second-rate American Athletic Conference, warrant the second spot in the national title game ahead of a one-loss team from the SEC, Pac-12 or Big Ten?

That scenario would be a fitting conclusion for the BCS, which – for all its faults — has helped make college football the second most-popular sport in the country and usher in the playoff era.

Without the BCS and its antecedents (the Alliance and Coalition), we wouldn’t have a four-team playoff. The conference commissioners and school presidents would never have gone from the old bowl system straight to a playoff.

While reading the projections below, and watching the season unfold, remember:

* Teams are eligible for at-large selection if they have nine wins and are in the top 14 of the final BCS standings.

The conference commissioners wrapped up their meetings Thursday after finalizing all but one important detail of the College Football Playoff, which kicks in after the 2014 regular season.

The unfinished business is the makeup of, and criteria used by, the selection committee that will determine the playoff teams and matchups (in much the same fashion the men’s basketball committee picks and seeds the March Madness field).

Look for the committee-related issue to be resolved later this year or early in ’14.

Here’s a quick recap of the major developments on the playoff front:

*** First, let’s tackle the topic on so many minds.

During a briefing with reporters Thursday, Executive Director Bill Hancock addressed the matter of going to eight (or more) teams prior to the expiration of the 12-year agreement:

“We know people are going to want eight (teams), and some are going to want 16, or 32. But it’s going to be four, for 12 years.”

* My ridiculously early college basketball top-25 for 2013-14 is coming next week, after NBA Draft decisions are finalized …

Action: Conference commissioners gather in Pasadena this week to hammer out details of the four-team playoff.Reaction I: We know the playoff begins after the 2014 season. We know the Rose and Sugar will host the first semifinals and that Cowboys Stadium will host the first title game (allegedly!). And we’re fairly certain that the Orange, Fiesta, Cotton and Chick-Fil-A will be part of the rotation.Reaction II: What we don’t know but will learn this week: The name of the playoff event and the site rotation. (Don’t expect a creative or unusual name. The commissioners will smartly follow a keep-it-simple-stupid approach.)Reaction III: What we won’t learn this week: Who’s on the selection committee, how the reps will be chosen and what the criteria will be for selecting the four teams. Every FBS conference will be represented, probably by a former-something-or-other (AD, coach, etc.), and the group will be modeled on the men’s basketball committee. But don’t expect resolution until later this year, if not early in ’14.

The biggest winner from the 2012-13 bowl season: Hope … Hope for lasting and significant change in major college football hiring practices.

We went 14 years without an African-American head coach winning a Bowl Championship Series game.

Last week, two were victorious on the sport’s biggest stage, Stanford’s David Shaw in the Rose and Louisville’s Charlie Strong in the Sugar, and a third, Texas A&M’s Kevin Sumlin, won a BCS-caliber game (the Cotton).

Their success, not only in the BCS but throughout the season, should have a positive coast-to-coast impact on hiring practices in the future:

But we won’t see significant, lasting progress until:

1) The majority of athletic directors will have come of age in the post-Civil Rights era, and

Officially, the bowl season lasts a little more than three weeks, from Dec. 15 through Jan. 7. That timeframe is a tad misleading, however, because two games are played five days earlier than all others and a handful are played later (post-Jan.1) than all others.

The heart of the postseason is a 13-day stretch featuring 27 games, and that stretch starts today (Thursday) with BYU and San Diego State colliding in the Poinsettia Bowl — a game I’d place on any must-see list given the mutual dislike the schools have for each other.

Actually, it’s BYU that dislikes San Diego State.

San Diego State hates BYU.

Here are my picks for games that don’t involve the Pac-12 teams. In keeping with regular-season routine, I’ve picked the San Jose State game and my four best bets.

Remember the week of Nov. 12? It was right after Alabama lost to Texas A&M, and there were three undefeated teams ranked ahead of the Crimson Tide, and we were all talking about whether the title game would match Oregon against Notre Dame or Kansas State against Oregon or Notre Dame against Kansas State, and I recall thinking: Could we really have a championship without the SEC?

Silly me, silly us. It’s the SEC’s world. We are simply fortunate to have a parking spot at the tailgate.

Let’s get to it …

Winner: The SEC. Taking aim at its seventh title in a row. Three of those would belong to Bama.

Loser: Oklahoma. Squeezed out of the BCS by Northern Illinois. All the Sooners can do is shrug it off and get ready for Johnny Football.

Winner: ESPN. Notre Dame-Alabama will be as close as college football comes to a Super Bowl-sized audience (and that’s still not very close).

Loser: The Big Ten. Doesn’t really matter what the topic is, frankly. Could be the regular season, or the bowl lineup, whatever. The B1G is a loser this year.

If you love it, enjoy it. If you hate it, then the semifinal format that takes effect with the 2014 regular season cannot come soon enough.

But do not, under any circumstances, expect it to go down quietly.

Given the chaos it has delivered over the past 14 years, the BCS is bound to cause more controversy, frustration, anxiety and outright outrage before going the way of the Bowl Coalition, the Bowl Alliance, and the Dodo.

That’s the single biggest day of the fall, with two monumental games amounting to a pair of semifinal showdowns: Oregon at USC and Alabama at LSU.

The SEC showdown is set for 5 p.m. (Pacific) on CBS. The kickoff time and network for the Pac-12 collision have not been announced, but prime time seems like a good bet.

And if those two games aren’t enough to lure you onto the couch, the first Saturday in November also features Missouri at Florida, Nebraska at Michigan State, Oklahoma State at Kansas State, TCU at West Virginia and San Diego State at Boise State.